Many website owners desire information concerning usage of their websites. For example, an Internet website owner might use a third party service to track the number of users that visit its website, the number of “clicks” these users collectively perform (using their mouse pointers) while visiting the website, and how long these users stay at the website. Using this objective information, the website owner may determine that its website is not attracting a sufficient number of users or has been ineffective at keeping the interest of users once they arrive. The website owner may react accordingly to improve its websites and, possibly, the success of its associated business operations.
Previous techniques for obtaining information concerning usage of websites often do not provide website owners with information about how users subjectively react to their websites, making the information of minimal value. Prior techniques that do solicit subjective user reactions do so with respect to transactions carried out using the website, but not with respect to the website itself. These techniques give website owners little if any information concerning subjective reactions of users to particular pages of their websites. Moreover, website owners are given little if any information about how users experience their websites as the users navigate through them, moving from page to page according to the topography of the websites. Even techniques that request users to provide subjective reactions concerning transactions may be relatively difficult to use, obtrusive, unstandardized, or otherwise deficient in some manner that causes them to be seldom used and therefore ineffective. The information reported to website owners may also be ineffective due to the format in which it is provided, for example, in reports that are difficult to interpret and do not allow useful comparisons to be made. These and other disadvantages make prior techniques inadequate for many website owners.